


I didn't fool you (but I failed you)

by SquaresAreNotCircles



Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: M/M, Matchmaking, POV Rachel Edwards, Past Rachel Edwards/Danny "Danno" Williams, Post-Episode: s07e23 Wehe 'ana (Prelude), i guess??, i have not the faintest clue how to tag this, technically (very very loosely) a coda to 7x23
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-28
Updated: 2018-11-28
Packaged: 2019-09-01 15:31:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,783
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16767913
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SquaresAreNotCircles/pseuds/SquaresAreNotCircles
Summary: She sinks down on the sofa with a sigh. After a second of deliberation, she kicks off her flats and puts her feet up on the coffee table. She’s allowed a little rule-breaking luxury, considering the call she’s making. “Is Commander McGarrett with you?”“Steve?” Danny asks, sounding perplexed she’d ask after him. “No, I wasn’t talking to you, you- Yeah, he’s here. But again, Rachel, since you didn’t deign to grace any of my previous inquiries with an answer:why?”In which Rachel calls Danny to tell Steve he should make his fucking move, already. Or: Sometimes it takes the most unlikely of people to make two idiots see sense.





	I didn't fool you (but I failed you)

**Author's Note:**

> So I rewatched the s7 finale and I’d completely forgotten how bad the whole Danny/Rachel thing was at that point. I have, uh, a lot of thoughts about Rachel – most of them revolving around how I absolutely don’t buy that Danny would ever consider getting back together with her after what she did to him and Charlie and by extension Grace, too, unless Danny is seriously still deluding himself into thinking that reuniting his little picture perfect family is the only way he could get a happy end – but I never really thought I’d be writing fic about her? But now I have? Kind of. It’s still overwhelmingly a Steve/Danny fic, but it’s Rachel’s POV, so she’s definitely there. 
> 
> I am perpetually baffled by my own choices in life. I think mostly I just really, really wanted to write something that closes all doors on possible Danny/Rachel in the future, because I’m pretty scared by the way the show seems to be keeping those doors wide open.
> 
> ANYWAY, all of that said, here’s a fic about Rachel anyway (but not at all about Danny/Rachel, don’t worry), because it just came rolling out, somehow. I do think she is an interesting character (in as much as she’s a character at all, with what little we see of her directly in canon), despite how much I loathe certain things she did. This is not a shot at redemption for her, exactly, but it’s something. Also, be aware I might be glossing over some issues, but I learned that from canon, which is a master at it.
> 
> The title is a line from _Only Love_ by Mumford and Sons.

The day Charlie comes home swarming about his new racecar bed at Danny’s place and how uncle Steve had looked after him the whole evening while Danny was away somewhere at work, is the day Rachel decides she’s had enough. It’s time for some rather drastic measures. As soon as she’s tucked Charlie into bed and has drawn his bedroom door shut behind her, she’s dialing Danny’s number. 

“Hi, Rachel,” he says, when he picks up. “How can I help you this fine evening?”

“Daniel, where are you?”

He sounds a lot more alert and a lot less sardonic when he answers. “Why? Did something happen?”

There’s a voice in the background, then. She can’t quite make out what it’s saying, but it sounds like it’s asking if everything is alright, and even hearing him over the phone and while barely audible, Rachel is sure she can make a very, very educated guess about who it is.

She sinks down on the sofa with a sigh. After a second of deliberation, she kicks off her flats and puts her feet up on the coffee table. She’s allowed a little rule-breaking luxury, considering the call she’s making. “Is Commander McGarrett with you?”

“Steve?” Danny asks, sounding perplexed she’d ask after him. “No, I wasn’t talking to you, you- Yeah, he’s here. But again, Rachel, since you didn’t deign to grace any of my previous inquiries with an answer: _why_?” 

She doesn’t have the patience for Danny’s incessant need to know everything. Her last nerve left through the window a minute ago, and if she tells him what she wants now, she’ll never get to talk to Steve. “Put him on, would you?”

“Who?”

“The dog,” she snaps. “You know who I mean.”

“I do know who you mean,” Danny admits, but in such a way that it sounds like an attack. “I’m playing dumb because this _is_ dumb. What could you possibly want to talk to Steve about?”

That not-so-distant voice speaks up again. When Danny replies, it’s muffled, probably because he’s holding his hand over the receiver. It’s fine. She doesn’t need to hear a word they’re saying to know what they’re arguing about, anyway.

“Hi,” is the next thing she hears clearly. “Rachel? This is Steve. Danny said you wanted to talk to me.” He manages not to make it sound like a question, to his credit. It just adds to her conviction that something needs to be done to make Danny see sense. He needs someone like that in his life.

“Yes, that’s right.” She makes a conscious effort to dial back on the irritability that’s constantly in her voice when she talks to Danny. She can’t disguise that she still sounds curt, but that might be for the best. “Are you well, Commander?”

“I’m fine, thanks,” he replies, just as polite and charming as she remembers him being. She can hear Danny grumble something in the background, but Steve doesn’t pay any more attention to him than she does. “How are you?” 

She leans her head back against the sofa. She wishes she had a drink in her free hand right now, but her desire to not have to move a single limb wins out by a narrow margin. She’ll just have to do this sober. “I am good, too. Commander, tell me – are you sleeping with my ex-husband?”

There’s a silence, then. She lets it settle over the line.

“Uh,” Steve says, after what must be at least a full ten seconds. All his composure seems to have evaporated. At least this offers up a possible explanation for how Danny’s been allowed to keep his head up his own arse about this for so long, because clearly Steve is not actually all that much better, despite the high hopes she’d had for him. “No.”

She lets her eyes roll freely, because no one is there to see her. “Well, you should be.”

“I, uh- I should?”

“Do you not want to?”

“I didn’t say that.” He chooses his words carefully, like he thinks if he speaks too quickly, he might offend her. It’s either oddly sweet or a little hilarious, after what she just dropped on him with no warning. “I guess I just didn’t expect, uh, to get a call like this, from you. It’s not like it matters, anyway.”

There he goes, displaying exactly why Danny fell for him, presumably. They’re matched in stupidity. Rachel can’t claim any points for subtlety in letting her crushes know she likes them – a particular traffic not-accident involving a Jersey cop comes to mind – but at least she _does_ it.

“Why?” she asks, instead of despairing.

“This is not just about me.” 

She has to wonder, at this point, what Danny is making of the side of the conversation he’s hearing. He’s been suspiciously quiet, but it’s possible he’s ranting at Steve non-verbally. Grace once gave a detailed report on a Five-0 game of charades, where her father and his partner had obliterated their colleagues, despite Danny allegedly spending at least half of his time on angry gestures when Steve guessed wrong.

Whatever the cause, Danny’s lack of interruptions gives her more time to get through to Steve. “Are you talking about Danny? Or the kids?”

“Both.”

That one’s easy. “Let me remind you that you’ve been taking care of our kids for years, and more importantly, he’s been letting you. Grace loves you and Charlie downright _adores_ you, just as much as he does Stan.” A little more, probably, now that Stan is breaking Charlie’s heart by only ever Skyping once a week from his new McMansion on the mainland. She can’t bring herself to admit that, because it would mean indirectly admitting that Danny has better taste in partners than she does. 

“But that’s just because your kids are great.” Steve sounds, impossibly, like he might actually believe that’s all it is.

Rachel had hoped it wouldn’t come to this, but it seems she will have to channel her inner Danny Williams for a bit and yell at Steve, if she wants to see this through. And dammit, does she want to see this through. She’s already come this far. “Commander,” she says, “you know who I once was to Danny, correct? You know we were in love and mistakenly thought we would spend the rest of our lives together?”

“Yes.”

“So then you know, too, that I am probably the world’s foremost expert on Danny when he is in love. And that means you’ll have to trust me, Commander, when I tell you that that’s what Danny is, right now.” She leaves just enough time to make the pause dramatic. Nobody said she couldn’t have a little fun while matchmaking her ex and scratching at her own wounds this way. “With you.”

“Why are you telling me all this?”

That’s a good question, which she has many and varied answers to. Somewhere, in the back of her mind, she might still be carrying a truckload of guilt around from depriving Danny and Charlie of a relationship for the first three years of Charlie’s life, and maybe she has a vain hope that fixing a different relationship of Danny’s will begin to make some manner of amends for her errors in judgement from back then. She could tell Steve that. The crazy thing is that it’s possible he would almost understand, because from what little she knows of him and his own dysfunctional family, he is that type of a person. 

But she won’t tell him, because it’s easier to evade the question altogether. Sometimes, she almost has some sympathy for the idiotic way Danny behaved towards the end of their marriage. “For God’s sake,” she says, psyching herself up again to come across madder and bolder than she feels, “you’re opening up a restaurant together that he’s agreed to name after you, Steve. Do you want to know what the only thing is that he ever named after me? I can’t tell you, because the answer is absolutely _nothing_ , and we were married for about a decade.”

“This is starting to sound like you’re telling me I should do a lot more than just sleep with him,” Steve points out, but he also finally, finally sounds like he might be coming around to her way of thinking.

That’s when Danny makes his presence known again. His creative cursing in the background is loud enough that she can understand every word of it. She is satisfied enough by her possible success that she can let herself be amused by Danny’s anger for once, instead of it provoking her into outbursts of similar emotional turbulence, if different in the methods of expression. There’s sounds of a scuffle on the other end of the line and then a crash, like the phone was dropped onto a hard surface, possibly the floor or a table.

The first voice she hears clearly afterwards is Danny’s. “Good _bye_ , Rachel,” he bites out, and ends the call.

It’s fine; it’s more or less how she expected this to go. She tosses her phone next to her on the couch, lets her head drop back again fully and closes her eyes. Realizing what she must have just started over at either Danny or Steve’s place, she feels a brief flash of remorse, but it evaporates when she really thinks about it. She spent years having to listen to Grace talk about how uncle Steve was there for almost every weekend Grace had with her Danno, and she can’t go through that again with Charlie. Undertaking the necessary steps to protect your own sanity is an often hard, but commendable endeavor made by intelligent people. She hopes.

She also hopes that Steve is a lot more adept at handling Danny when he starts yelling for real than she ever was.

*

The next morning, just as she’s attempting to lure Charlie out of bed with the promise of sugary breakfast cereal, she receives a text. After she’s managed to convince Charlie to stagger out of bed and onto the toilet, she has a second to open it. _Thanks,_ it reads. _Also, stay out of my fucking business in the future, please and thank you._

She smiles at herself, and then catches on to the fact that it’s seven in the morning and she’s smiling at a prickly text from her ex confirming that her meddling managed to secure him a new relationship, so she stops smiling because it’s awkward from so many angles. She keeps a very content and slightly hopeful feeling in her chest, though, which she carries around with her for the rest of the day.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading!! I'm very curious to hear what you think of this, or just what your opinion on Rachel is, if you want to rant for a bit. <3
> 
> I'm on Tumblr as [itwoodbeprefect](https://itwoodbeprefect.tumblr.com), or with my exclusively H50 sideblog as [five-wow](https://five-wow.tumblr.com).


End file.
